Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday March 02, 2012 @03:23PM
from the mainly-restaurant-servers-lives dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports on how millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill. Government figures show that almost half the working population of England have only primary school math skills, and research suggests that weak math skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, poverty and long-term illness. 'We are paying for this in our science, technology and engineering industries but also in people's own ability to earn funds and manage their lives,' says Chris Humphries. He is the chairman of National Numeracy, an organization seeking to emulate the success of the National Literacy Trust, which has helped improve reading and writing standards since it was set up nearly 20 years ago. The Department for Education wants the vast majority of young people to study math up to 18 within a decade to meet the growing demand for employees with high level and intermediate math skills. 'It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say "I can't do maths,"' adds Humphries. "

Cashiers used to be expected to be capable of some basic arithmetic, but not so anymore.

It used to be that they would confirm the change amount by adding it up from the owed amount to the paid amount. Now, they just pile the change on top of the bills and silently try to slide it onto your hand, which invariably results in some of the precariously piled change falling onto the counter.

And if, after they've rung it in and had the cash register tell them how much change to give, you try to give them a little extra change so that they'll give you back a nice round bill instead, then they'll just stare at you like you're trying to pay with live snails.

CompUSA, before it went bankrupt, had some of the worst cashiers and managers of all time.

I have tried to purchase a $30-$40 dollar item before, handed the girl a $100 bill, and she handed me back ~$160 dollars in change. I just looked at her for a moment and then nicely asked if she wanted to double check that. She acted like I was trying to rip her off and failed the double check. Gave her a quick math lesson and walked off.

? Whenever I pay by cash the change amount is worked out on the register from the amount tendered. Seems like there is actually no need for any basic mathematical skills these days apart from just counting up the change to match the read out on the register. Not saying it is right, just that the modern cash register has made all but the most fundamental mathematical skills redundant at the cash point.

Sometimes, when I buy just three or four items, I add up the bill in my head while I am in the line. The following scene already happened to me two times: the cashier tells me the total, I realize it doesn't match, I make a strange face and say something, I double-check the bill, I realize that they have scanned an item twice. The saving was trivial, but the impression you make on the cashier is priceless.

This is terrible thinking. You're right, the cashier doesn't have to know anything about arithmetic to give out change - unless they accidentally hit the wrong button the register. Which they do. Because fingers are fat and slow, and registers are dumb machines. So when the cashier hits $10.00 instead of $20.00 for the bill I gave him, I want him to know enough math to give me an extra $10 in change - since that's what he owes me.
If you think this is a trivial example, manage some cashiers sometime. A qua

I worked at Wendy's through high school, so I have some experience with cash registers and handling those small amounts of cash. I also have a degree in math - simple arithmetic has never been an issue for me. That quarter of people who adjust quickly were either paying extra attention to you for some reason, or were new at their jobs. Handling a cash register is a simple, repetitive task so your brain quickly makes a habit out of the normal transaction and you do it unconsciously. When someone tells you you've made a mistake your brain turns off autopilot and dumps you into a situation you haven't really been aware of. They shouldn't need to call for help, but it does give you a moment of panic, like walking in the front door of your house and not remembering the trip home because you weren't really paying attention. That moment makes it look like you don't know what you're doing, but that isn't always the case.

And if, after they've rung it in and had the cash register tell them how much change to give, you try to give them a little extra change so that they'll give you back a nice round bill instead, then they'll just stare at you like you're trying to pay with live snails.

This is also the case, for different reasons, in Japan. If you give someone extra money to make the change a round number, they give it back to you first, and then give you change. And the most hilarious thing is that vending machines there have the exact same behavior.

Disclairmer: I am no expert on japan, but this was the experience I had on a short trip there several years ago.

You wanna know what is sad? I ended up getting $25 worth of groceries free last year because the local grocery was gonna have to shut down because their cash registers went on the fritz. i told them "If you need them so bad why don't you just send someone down the street to pick up some cheapo calcs?' but since they were short handed the manager offered to pay me for the calcs AND give me my groceries for free if I'd go do it. They were late teens/early twenties and not a single one could count change witho

I spent a summer working a register, and I can tell you that while at the start of the summer I could make change in my head fairly quickly and accurately, something about the mental state of using the register to figure change absolutely ruined that faculty. Took a couple of months for it to return in the fall.

ex wife goes to a store armed with a 25% off coupon. buys a few items and goes to register. the cashier can't figure out 25% off, even with a calculator. so she calls the manager. they slap some buttons for a while and eventually decide on an amount that's 25% of the price... ex wife wishes she'd bought a cart load.

Insurance is not quite the same as gambling... while it is true that *if* you can afford it, self insurance (i.e. none) is generally more economical in the long run, most people are not able to absorb the high impact, low frequency damages that insurance protects against. If you can't absorb losing your house @ $250k, then you get fire insurance. If you can't absorb the cost of a new car in the event you crash your own, you get car insurance.

The warranties thing is definitely true, though, as most people can afford a new computer ($1k) if their current one breaks. Given the price of extended warranties, if you buy it three or four times you have spent enough to buy a new machine anyway.

Car insurance covers much more than just the new car. Car insurance mainly covers the damage you could inflict upon others if you make a mistake while driving. I don't know if you are able to pay the care for someone who is quadriplegic for the rest of his life because you hit his motocycle in an accident.

Car insurance has limits, and the legally mandated minimums are silly in some places. In many, if not all, U.S. states, the minimums are at or under $20k per person in bodily injury liability coverage. If I'd be seriously injured by someone in a car accident, then say $20k pretty much pays to get me in the door of a hospital and may cover a relatively simple trauma case like a simple fracture of a leg, say. It won't cover any rehabilitation, loss of wages, nor any complex procedures that include external circulation and such, nor will it cover more than a couple of days of stay in the hospital. IOW: it's a joke. I personally carry injury coverage for more than 25x that, and I seriously consider doubling or tripling that.

Of course, if most people were required to bear complete financial responsibility for an accident, they'd be unable to drive. That would grind the economy to a halt. The real solution to this problem is universal health care. If you get into an accident, it shouldn't matter how wealthy the person at fault is.

The generally poor understanding of numbers on the part of others adversely affects my life as well. Not only to the extent that they make poor decisions for themselves, but from the way they make poor decisions on my behalf. Damn politicians.

A large part of the problem is that if they got math at all then it was part of the track to the physical sciences (algebra -> algebra 2 -> calculus -> differential equations).

Voters who aren't in a physics-based career need math, but not the same branch of it. Statistics is critical. Understanding what correlation means and what it doesn't, what a control group is for, recognizing sample bias, and definitely the base rate fallacy are all vital for resisting propaganda.

Actually, people need to understand what are models. And yes, this includes understandings statistics, and errors.

It is essentially the same skill that makes you understand that "this move will cut x$ from the budget" contains no information and what order of magnitude your change is supposed to be. You create models all the time: a car approaches: should you cross the road? It depends on the speed of the cars and yours. You could calculate the results, but the important thing is that you can identify which are the factors, why they matter and that you could bash them together to get a numerical answer. Then, you can decide whether you really want to do that.

The point is that people bemoan innumeracy in terms of "people can't add numbers in their heads very well". Well duh. This is why before calculators, we had abacuses, and why computers used to be people. But it is irrelevant: the basic skill is making models of reality, realising that you can get numbers out of them if needed, and that what matters is the _model_ of the guy selling you this insurance/car/political programme. His numbers may be crap, but you may fix that. If his model is based on the interpretation of the multiply mistranslated myths of bronze-aged shepherds, then beware.

There used to be a thing in classical education called the "trivium". It's the origin of our modern English word "trivial", and the latter got its meaning because the trivium was considered the basic groundwork that every educated adult was expected to know already. It consisted of three subjects: grammar, (propositional) logic, and rhetoric. We only bother trying to teach the first of these to people today, and generally let them reach adulthood without having really mastered even it.

I think that these three "trivial" subjects should not only be reinstated, but they should be paired with comparable mathematical subjects which should be considered equally trivial requirements for any adult: arithmetic, (elementary) algebra, and statistics.

In primary school, kids should learn their grammar and arithmetic, and be capable of accomplishing basic tasks with words and numbers, writing and understanding qualitative and quantitative statements.

In middle school, kids should learn their elementary algebra and propositional logic, and be capable of meaningfully converting qualitative and quantitative statements between each other, seeing how words and numbers relate to each other in a more abstract way.

In high school, kids should learn statistics and rhetoric, to be able to persuade people with both words and numbers and, even more importantly, to avoid being mislead by others attempting to do the same.

Trigonometry, calculus, and all the more advanced mathematics are awesome and may be necessary depending on what you want to do, but are not necessary just to function in the world. Likewise predicate and modal logics and all the more complex variations on those; anyone who argues for a living (i.e. most politicians, lawyers, etc) should be required to understand them as much as a physicist needs to know calculus, but normal people can get by well enough without them.

Innumeracy is what keeps the mythology of supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve alive.

The usual Laffer curve argument doesn't even rely on innumeracy, it relies on the inability of those to be indoctrinated to do basic logic. Has anyone actually *seen* this fabled curve? All you get is the trivial cases of no revenue at 0 and 100% tax rate, and, ergo *jedi hand wave*, we must lower taxes. If you do actually plot revenue against rate for different countries, you get a complete mess which you cannot fit against any meaningful function. That is not the purpose anyway, the whole Laffer curve argument relies on that Jedi hand wave.

All you get is the trivial cases of no revenue at 0 and 100% tax rate, and, ergo *jedi hand wave*, we must lower taxes

It is a consequence of three things, the assumption that revenue as a function of tax rate is continuous (loosely, that small changes in tax rate mean small changes in revenue), the above assumption that there is zero revenue at 0 and 100% tax rate, and Rolle's Theorem [wikipedia.org]. The combination of those three things yields the Laffer curve. The theorem is unassailable. That means one of the two assumptions have to be wrong before the Laffer curve model is wrong.

You aren't really complaining about the Laffer curve, but rather about a rhetorical and unwarranted jump from existence of the curve to deciding that tax rates must be lowered. That only would be true, if a) the current tax rate is above the optimal rate, and b) maximizing or increasing tax revenue is a primary goal, neither which was established in your example.

It doesn't help that figuring out what the Laffer curve looks like is extraordinarily hard. For example, there's no reason to expect that the Laffer curve for the US and Sweden would be the same. The primary reason just being the relevant effectiveness of public spending in each country. The US is remarkably less effective at spending public funds (at all levels of government) than Sweden is.

So one would expect that a lower tax rate would be more effective in the US for increasing overall revenue (that is, private sources are more effective at increasing value and future revenue relative to public means in the US than the same in Sweden). And actual tax rates (including state and local levels) in the US are usually lower than those in Sweden.

Here [wikimedia.org] is an example of real world data. I know such things can be very disturbing if you bought into the economic woo spread lately, but hey, believe what you want. Reality, however, is independent of your personal religion.

Most people don't have a "personal" religion. It conforms to a few templates, and generally, with a low rate of deviation.

Reality, as a philosophical term, simply refers to that which exists. Even that varies. Some people say that reality is comprised of your perceptions and that it is existence that represents the actual state independent of your perceptions. Only philosophers that are serious enough to study and interact with other philosophers tend to have more standardized terms.

Well, if tax rates are 100% then there is no disposable money left, so no economic activity and no tax revenue

No economic activity at 100%? The citizenry may not be spending money but the government will still be doing so; if the money is not spent it will be a meaningless concept. If in this hypothetical situation the government spends the money to to cater adequately for all citizens needs (i.e. the nation becomes an utopian socialism), then there is in theory no problem. It is not necessary for the government to spend the money itself, it is perfectly possible for the government to give every citizen an allowance to spend according their wishes.
Don't ask for examples; this is just a rebuttal of the quoted statement, which is not 'obviously correct'. I appreciate it might make more sense in the context of monetarist economics. But that comes with a whole load of preconceptions, which you have taken for granted.

My eldest son is a whiz- he's a couple years ahead and should get through AP Calculus and Stats by the time he gets through HS.

On the other hand we adopted 5 girls from foster care and it is a STRUGGLE. I don't know how much of it is organic (all of them were exposed to drugs/alcohol in utero) and how much of it is early formative, but they all have incredible difficulty making the most basic inference or deduction or story problem. I'm really concerned for them because I forsee them potentially running into the roadblocks referenced by the article summary. But there are in fact SOME excuses for saying "I can't do maths." Some people may never be able to master the basics no matter how hard they try.

Not to say we are in any manner giving up. They get extra tutoring at school and spend hours doing homework, despite being in elementary school, but different people have different top levels of achievement and sometimes that level is below what any of us would like.

In my own experience, the hardest part about math is mastering the basics (simple arithmetic). But after that point, learning most things mathematical is like jumping between baby steps.

If it's possible, I would advise working with your girls for as long as possible with the basic math skills until they get if, even if takes years. It would be nice if all schools could be configured to let some students work at their own pace (whether behind or ahead), but since they don

Yeah mate. What an awesome thing to do! Hope things go well in the future for you all. Despite their difficulties, they probably don't yet realise how lucky they already got (to have a Slashdotter as a Dad:)). It is always saddening to think that some orphans unfortunately never get picked (for whatever reason).

Have you considered that they aren't necessarily "mathematically challenged" but instead need to approach it from a different angle? For example, I've worked with a handful of physical trainers (as a client) and universally all of them thought they were bad at math - not even able to understand compound interest bad.

But all of them that were good at their job also had a natural intuition for things like geometry and even calculus because those maths were all part of their jobs. For example, the body is a bunch of interconnected levers with ranges of motion described by arcs and different rates of change in motion can be safe or dangerous. They work with math all day long but they don't recognize it as math - they even had a hard time understanding that it was math when I tried to explain it to them - their schooling had so completely failed them that they couldn't recognize the math right in front of them.

Well, while I wouldn't want to adopt the Japanese philosophy of education wholesale, one of things I think that's worth copying from their culture is the way people don't automatically make this kind of inference: "I'm not good at X THEREFORE I shouldn't have to do X."

If you can put that behind you, then you can think this way: "I may not be naturally talented at X, but if I work hard enough I can learn to do it well enough."

Not to minimize the difficulties you're experiencing with your adopted children. I

It is also simply inexcusable for people to live well beyond their means riddled with massive amounts of pointless debt, but let's go ahead and blame calculus for the reason most people are flat-ass broke, living paycheck to paycheck. Lord knows we wouldn't want to offend anyone by telling them they SUCK at saying "no".

I think it's more of a matter of people being exceptionally lazy recently versus in the past than it is a matter of poor numerical comprehension. Everyone's attitude seems to be "I don't need to understand it, there's an app for that."...then again, I'm a computer programmer who deals with charts and numbers thoroughly on an hourly basis, and I don't think I've ever had to read the "How to use this guide" section on the 40-some page bus schedule in my town to figure it out.

Sometimes I wonder if a global-scale EMP or solar flare would be the best thing to ever happen to humanity.

I don't think the general amount of laziness has changed. What's changed is that the landing for those who crash due to their own laziness is much softer these days. Prior to the modern era there were strong disincentives to not "figuring it out." Even as hard as times are now economically, the disincentives are far easier to deal with for those who choose not to look beyond their narrow worldview of what is and is not "possible."

Millions of people struggle to understand. Whatever. We do remember that we come from a times when there was no math around at all, right? So how much time do we spend being happy abouth the fact that millions of people do understand a payslip or a train timetable? Making fuss about these millions without context shows poor skills in philosophy and can ruin lives.

Some important questions to ask around these skills and the millions are here:How many and much total skills do people have?Is the total going up or down?Is the relative amount of math skills in this total going up or down?What are the other skills that might be replacing or being replaced by math skills?Which skills should be priorities? For which professions?

weak math skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, getting a knighthood for services to the banking industry and then having it revoked.

The other day - in a discussion of quantum computing, of all things - I was downvoted into oblivion and called a "stupid fuck" twice for pointing out that a quantity that grows at a constant rate follows an exponential growth curve. Now I don't think the people behind that were necessarily innumerate, because one of them managed to misapply some first-semester calculus in his argument. What does often happen is that people who learn some math in a rote way are unable to apply it to real-world problems, or even to interpret them correctly. Taking a math course or two - unless focused on creative problem-solving - isn't necessarily going to help much.

A quantity that grows at a constant rate grows linearly. A quantity that grows at a rate proportional to its value (which is necessarily not constant, unless it is zero) grows exponentially. What you describe is something like x-dot = c, which is linear growth. Something like x-dot= c x is exponential. (if you are familiar with the symbols from calculus). I wouldn't go as a far as calling you a "stupid fuck", but what you are saying about constant rates is incorrect.

I'll nip this in the bud and post something similar here to what I posted in the thread which drooling-dog referred to.

"Rate" is ambiguous. You can have a fixed rate of acceleration, which means linear growth; you can also have a fixed interest rate, which means exponential growth. Neither is really any more correct than the other, and the meaning of the phrase "constant rate" is very hard to interpret without any context to indicate what is meant by it.

Linked with means related to. There's no causation implied, sorry. Xkcd's comic [xkcd.com] had a lot of success and since then it's a knee jerk reaction to accuse people of confusing the two terms, but it often pays off to count to three.

No, and while the GP was a troll, there is a point to be made here –the problem in the UK is that people don't want to be educated in maths. There's a large segment of society that thinks that it's good to be numerically illiterate. They wear "I don't know maths" as if it's a badge of honour. That is stupid.

These people aren't uneducated. They went to school. They received an education. If after years of schooling you still can't divide 114 by 6 given a pad and pencil and a couple minutes of quiet time, you don't get to claim "But I'm just uneducated!". You're stupid, either willfully or otherwise.

Really, you should be able to do the above in your head in seconds, but out of necessity we're setting the bar pretty much on the ground.

Aristotle pointed out that one's capacity for virtue is limited by one's intelligence.

To put it simply: if you truly want to do the right thing, but you are so uneducated that you can't figure out what the right thing is, you wind up not doing the right thing. The thing you actually do is one of the wrong things, and so it is probably harmful to someone.

Even if the soul of such a person is as pure as untrodden snow, the actual outcomes of their actual actions are equivalent to those of a morally inferior person.

When a person is in a position that his actions could harm others (such as, say, an airplane pilot who’s actions could crash the plane), that person is morally obligated to attain and maintain a high level of competence. However, since we all live as part of an interconnected society, we are *all* in this position. Any action we take could harm others if not thought through, so lifelong self-education is a moral imperative for all of us.

Everyone has genetic limits to intelligence, and limits on opportunities for education, which are forgivable. When you hit those limits and need to make decisions that are beyond them, the morally correct thing to do is seek guidance from someone who is more appropriately educated.

If you do neither; if you insist on remaining ignorant and on directing your life based on this ignorance, then you harm everyone around you. You are therefore guilty of negligence, and therefore you are a bad person.

You don't understand how natural selection or evolution work, do you? The innumerate are winning at the natural selection game because they can't figure out how bad having another kid is going to be for them financially.

Having another kid ISN'T bad for them financially. The welfare state is there to make sure of that.

Schooling and education were once considered important because they provided a way out of poverty. Now the government provides. Why bother with pointless chores like learning arithmetic?

I suggest you have never met a mathematician - it is a sure identifying characteristic that they can't do arithmetic.

Just like Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, and Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, it is also the case that Real Mathematicians Can't Do Arithmetic.

A Real Mathematician knows about the number zero, and several different versions of the "number" infinity, and can probably cope with the number one on a good day, but any other numbers are arithmetic, not maths, and far too applied to be worthy of their attention.

I have a maths degree, but completely screwed up some basic arithmetic recently. Arithmetic is, as you said, a branch of mathematics, but it not the sum total (pun intended) or even a necessary part. Rather than equating it with not knowing the letters of the alphabet, I'd liken it to being unable to spell:

Good spelling, while useful in every day life isn't nearly as important as being able to write well and understand complex texts; a computer can help you with spelling. Similarly in maths, good arithmetic can be useful in life in speeding things up a bit, but with calculators on every phone and computer it isn't crucial. Whereas the important bits of maths (analytical thinking, the rigours of proof, reasoning, deduction etc.) are much harder to get a computer to help with, and are much harder to spot in oneself if not present.

It doesn't really matter if people can't remember how to do long division or multiplication by hand; what matters is that they find out/work out how to do so when needed. Given that, the OP's point does have some validity, and is not merely pedantic. That said, the title mentions "numeracy", not mathematics.

Of course, the real problem seems to be not that people cannot do maths (which, anecdotally, ime, they usually can when given encouragement and a few pointers), but that they're being taught to answer maths test questions, rather than understand the principles behind the problems; as such, it's easy to forget the specific methods, and hard to work them out later when needed. Sadly this seems to be a problem across much of the UK education system.

I come from the UK and personally find mathematics pretty difficult. I can work through problems on paper but my mental arithmetic is atrocious. By the time I two operands and an operator in my head and have broken up the problem into a simpler problem, I have forgotten the original two numbers...

That said, mathematics should come the more you practice. I like to blame the school curriculum -- it is shit. The only reason why I am valuable is because I acquired computing skills playing on computers as a child.

I'd like to blame mathematics textbooks but I cannot. My generation and a few before me have lost the willpower and motivation to actually study and learn things properly. Our education system does not really promote mathematics that well. My school staff was rife with young twenty somethings fresh out of university with no real ability to teach...

Teaching has lost its respect and professionalism in the UK too. Add to the fact it became okay and even cool to be ignorant in modern culture.

US public schools pretty much destroy all the fun in learning, too. Not to mention that there's this "teach to the test" mentality going on. As long as you can pass a test, that is all that matters. Memorize and forget (which is what usually happens).

It's worse than that. Today's society requires, IMHO, as part of the basic literacy, to not only know how to read and write, but to have good numeracy skills, and to have decent understanding of basic science and of issues related to applied computing -- at least as far as security, social engineering, etc. is concerned.

I think that the real issue is that things are taught in a way that separates them in the heads of the pupils. Instead of having a coherent image of science and technology, overlapping and applying to everyday experiences, the knowledge is built in an abstract way and seems to be decoupled from real life. People seem to be horribly unable to apply basic principles from grade level maths, physics, chemistry and biology to everyday life. That's why you see so many people go "dumb" when they see computers: no one taught them in a way that links computing to other knowledge they have. It's black magic to them because it was never shown to them to be otherwise; they don't understand that computers fundamentally process numbers according to fixed recipes, etc. That's why there's so much bad legislation around: the lawmakers don't have a clue how their laws relate to reality, they only see political buzzwords.

Terribly insightful post - I wish that every parent who hated school thought about this. This force-feeding may be one small reason why the brightest kids tend to gravitate toward careers in IT or finance over science and math - every decent first course in programming shows a kid how to do or learn to do almost anything he or she can imagine doing, and with no oversight from the teacher. It's rare that a math or science teacher has the expertise to guide a student through any interesting independent proj

I think that the real issue is that things are taught in a way that separates them in the heads of the pupils.

Are they? I remember when I was in school a lot of kids used to complain that math was irrelevant to daily life. And then we learned word problems, and they complained about how awful word problems were. Somehow it never got through to them that word problems were exactly what they were asking for, a demonstration of how to apply math to real life.

The weird thing is that the kids who hated math because it was useless outside of school seemed to love English class, which really is useless outside of school. Somehow they're able to get over the barrier of "school stuff is only useful in school" for English, but once they get into math class they have no imagination at all.

I suspect it really is incuriosity. They like English class because it's easy, you can make up whatever you want, and it doesn't have to be right because there is no right answer (alt

Don't feel bad. Doing math in your head has been replaced by calculators. Application of math is where it's at.

I know plenty of people who can do math in their head, but can't actually use it for anything outside of homework.

But you don't always have a calculator when you need one (or don't want to take the time to pull out your phone and start up the calculator app). Being able to do simple math in your head can be a huge advantage in life to do a quick sanity check on lots of things.

I recently spotted an error in some home purchase paperwork A number that was supposed to be 3% of the purchase price was actually 7%. The listing agent didn't believe me that it was wrong until she pulled out her calculator to run the numbers. It's trivial to estimate 3% of a number in your head - finding 3% of $325,000 means rounding down to $3K for 1% and multiplying by 3 to get $9K. It's not exact, but often a rough estimate is enough. I later ran all the numbers through a calculator to be sure they were exact, but I saved myself another day of waiting for corrected paperwork by having her correct it in her office instead of waiting until I got home to discover the error.

While it's true that most people have a calculator close at hand these days, how many people take the time to actually use it, especially when they think that someone else already used their calculator to calculate the numbers, so they assume it's already correct?

And I really can't believe how many people have to get a calculator to evenly add a tip and divide a lunch bill 4 ways! And then proceed to say "Ok, everyone owes $8.79" instead of just saying "$9".

I agree. To me, not being able to do math in your head is akin to being unable to spell properly without a dictionary/spellchecker. If you can't write properly, you'll be called illiterate, the same IMHO should apply if you can't figure out the math of basic everyday things -- frontloading of debt repayment with interest, dealing with change when paying for things, how MPG is a nonlinear scale, etc.

If you have to pull out your phone, fiddle with the buttons, start up a calculator application and fiddle with the buttons again just to figure out that that the $27.50 plus 12% tax that you owe is substantially less than the $34 you were just charged, then perhaps you should just give up and expect to pay a 10% innumeracy tax on every transaction you make for the rest of your life.

Saying "But I have a calculator! Somewhere." is no substitute for being able to perform simple math on your own.

I guess it's what you grew up with. If you come from a country where tax is included in the displayed price, and where tipping is not a screwed up part of the culture, then it's nontrivial to train yourself to have to do these sums you are simply not used to doing.

Tips, I can understand I suppose, it's part of the culture here and the wages are adjusted down to account for tips, I am sure. But why the hell not display the *actual* price of a product? Pisses me off lol.

Unfortunately, while we used to have separate exams for arithmetic and mathematics, the powers that be decided that the best way to narrow the gap between low achieving inner city schools and high-achieving middle class schools was to merge the many different exams into single subjects; arithmetic and mathematics became general mathematics; physics, chemistry, biology and APH became general science.

Back 30 years, there used to be adverts on TV at every lunch-time to help people with literacy and numeracy skills, titled "On the move". They just mentioned a hotline anyone could call to arrange an appointment with an adviser (information pack or application forms wouldn't be much use). These days, it's cheaper for employers to employ East Europeans with English as a second language.

dont worry about those pesky details. Statistics show that most people move every 3 to 4 years, so you just sell the house before the balloon is due. The way that real estate always appreciates, you should be able to cover your next down payment with the profits from selling this one.

I don't know why this got modded down because it is dead on. My brother has a Master's in mathematics, and teaches math for a living. (I think he's covering Statistics this year). It drives him crazy to hear someone give him a bunch of number to add in his head thinking that he must be able to do that if he's good at math. Sort of like how us software engineers like to hear questions about doing something in the Microsoft Office tool du jour since we know about "that computer stuff".

The wings of the balloon structure had ellipsoid partitions wrapped in plastic. Not only did I need to make these partitions, I also needed to wrap them with a plastic sheet of appropriate dimension. It turns out that the perimeter of ellipses doesn't have an exact formula, but does have adequate approximations. That allowed us to make useful mass calculations on the design (mass here being a critical parameter of balloon systems which determines not only how much the balloon can lift, but even whether it c

At the college physics class (two-semester course of physics for Electrical Engineers), we were told to keep our calculators in out pockets and do the math in our heads. This being a course for engineers, we were given a 20% error margin. Since I had been doing this in high school anyway, I found myself being able to guesstimate ("mental quarter-precision FPU") the results with precision somewhere around 1%. It takes some practice, but it works. I guess it's the result of me having been an occasional slide

And the LORD spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.